Mr. Speaker, Bill C-6 has been referred to as a housekeeping bill. I suppose that is reasonably accurate. The government has moved on this, quite a bit later than it should have given the announcement that came with regard to this type of legislation almost a year ago when the present Prime Minister became Prime Minister. It is simply an attempt on the part of the government to consolidate the functioning of our security forces, the work that we do both nationally and internationally with regard to the security of our citizenry.
As we have heard, all parties are in support of this legislation. In effect it is a very short bill when the amendments to other legislation are taken out. It simply consolidates a number of the agencies.
I do want to say that the provisions in the bill that were placed before the justice committee were such that it was responded to in a cooperative fashion by the committee. I believe it is an attempt by all parties to cooperate and make the minority government situation not only function but function well. I believe we went quite some distance in achieving that.
I have to say perhaps as an aside that questions remain with regard to the restructuring of our security forces, but in a spirit of cooperation those concerns were set aside by the committee to be addressed at a future date.
I will mention one of the items. There was some discussion as to whether the agencies that fall within the purview of the minister, in this case the Deputy Prime Minister, are as broad as they could be. I spent a good deal of my summer dealing with security issues, both in this country and internationally. What kept coming up was this need to have cooperation to make sure we do not create silos where we have territorial infighting and protection of our own territory, at times to the detriment of the security in the country. We heard that from our allies in the United States, England and Australia. It was a common theme.
This legislation goes some distance toward achieving that, but as I say, it does not bring in all of our security agencies. This is a question that was raised at the committee, but in a sense of cooperation we put off the question so this bill could move forward quickly and we could begin to do this coordination that everyone agreed was necessary.
The sense of cooperation was there and was acted upon. A number of amendments got proposed, two of which passed. I want to make mention of one that did not. It was not proposed by committee members but by the Privacy Commissioner.
There is no question that the Privacy Commissioner had valid concerns about the issue of privacy and in fact the security of information that is gathered by our security forces, both domestically and internationally. We have heard a great deal about the use that the Patriot Act is being put to by our American allies. This is one of the areas where we would be concerned. There was a concern expressed about the way this information is used, in particular because of the suspicions in the Arar case about it being used improperly. For that, we will wait for the outcome of Justice O'Connor's report and recommendations.
Those issues were raised. Again, in this sense and spirit of cooperation that was in the committee, we indicated to the Privacy Commissioner and to the government that we were prepared to set those concerns aside to be dealt with later, either within the scope of this legislation and bill or in other areas, but it would be a matter that we would address down the road. We felt it was simply too important to get this legislation in place so we proceeded on that basis and in fact did so expeditiously.
One of the controversial issues that is now before the House is that the government, in response to the report from the committee when this bill was reported out at report stage, has now moved this amendment. It would in effect overturn the amendment that we received from the Bloc member for Marc-Aurèle-Fortin, wherein he wanted to draw clear jurisdictional lines between the federal government, the provinces and the territories.
All three of the opposition parties supported that approach. We in the NDP do not believe, as was suggested by the parliamentary secretary earlier this morning, that the implications of passing this amendment do not set a permanent type of precedent. He admitted he was not a constitutional expert and he is right in that regard, if in fact he was going to take that position. The long term effect is that it will be in the bill and in the law. We have indicated that at that time, and I will repeat it now on behalf of my party, we are going to address the issue of provincial and territorial rights vis-à-vis the federal government on a file by file, bill by bill and law by law basis.
In this case, it is appropriate, because again one of the things that I think was drawn very clearly to our attention this summer as the committee did its work on public security is the amount of additional work being done in intelligence gathering and in public security, work that has traditionally been done at the federal level and by federal police agencies and services and is now being done in a cooperative fashion with the provincial and municipal police forces in the country.
We want it to be very clear that although this cooperation has been extended by those government agencies at the provincial and municipal level, we did not want to see an incursion by the federal government into what have been traditional areas of responsibility for the provinces and territories in accordance with our constitutional framework in this country.
The motion that was put forward for an amendment by the member for Marc-Aurèle-Fortin was appropriate. It is one that in the circumstances we supported and we continue to support now. We are clearly saying to the government we will not support it returning the bill to the state it was in when it got to committee.
I want to make one final point with regard to that. We as a party have argued that we need to expand the role of the committees in the House and the government and within our constitutional framework. It is part of the democratic deficit to which the Prime Minister is very fond of referring, but I have to say that we have to question his sincerity at a time like this when the committee clearly discussed this issue. It was a full discussion. Members listened to the opinions from all sides and said to the government that in this case the amendment was appropriate. That was a clearly democratic process. It is one that should in fact be honoured by the government, so we draw to the attention of the House the fact that the government is ignoring all of the platitudes that it has put out around democratic deficit and the need for reform when it moves this type of amendment at report stage.
The committee discussed it. The committee went through a democratic process. The committee reached a decision and has now reported that decision to the House. That should be honoured by the government and by the House.
In conclusion, I will say that we are supportive of the bill but we are going to insist that the amendments that were passed at committee be honoured by the House.